2017 NCAA NCSS Rankings: Week 8

We're halfway through the college football regular season now, with just seven weeks left to play. Only six of these weeks will actually involve full slates of games, with Week 14 being Championship Week. I'll get to that when the time comes though.

For now, we're focused on the upcoming schedule for Week 8. With conference play in full swing, there are very few non-conference games on the schedule, but they happen. With four independent teams, there's always going to be at least a few games that fit this banner. And that's before we get to Nick Saban Is A Coward Week, which is coming up in about a month.

If you need a refresher on how this metric works, you can read that in my season introductory post. Let's look at the schedule!

1. MAC (0.00, 6.17; LW: 1). No change.
2. Sun Belt (0.42, 5.25; LW: 4). Idaho visits Missouri, Georgia Southern visits Massachusetts.
3. Conference USA (0.00, 5.14; LW: 2). No change.
4. Mountain West (0.00, 5.08; LW: 3). No change.
5. American Athletic (0.25, 4.17; LW: 6). Temple visits Army, East Carolina hosts BYU.
6. Big Ten (0.00, 4.07; LW: 5). No change.
7. Big 12 (0.00, 3.60; LW: 7). No change.
8. Pac 12 (0.17, 3.08; LW: 9). USC visits Notre Dame.
9. ACC (0.00, 2.93; LW: 8). No change.
10. SEC (0.07, 2.57; LW: 10). Missouri hosts Idaho.

To see the updated spreadsheet, click here.

We had quite a few non-conference games this week, a lot more than I expected. Fortunately, we had no FCS games to bring any scores down. We had a few changes in position, but now we have the usual sorting of the Group of Five in the top five, with the Power Five at the bottom. And if the independents were their own conference, they would now have an average NCSS of 12.25, almost double the MAC's total.

That's it for now! I'll be back on Monday with a look at the results from the weekend, and my third mock bracket.